KEVAN BAKER WANTED TO FORGET Wanda Lopez’s final moments. He didn’t know Wanda, but her last conscious act before dying was to collapse in his arms, begging for help. Seconds before, he’d wrestled with his own conscience as he watched her through the window wrestling with her attacker.
For a second or two, the smallish, blond, bespectacled car salesman, who trained as a medic in the navy, had debated whether to go to the woman’s aid or leave. When he decided to go to her, he came face to face with the fleeing attacker, who threatened to pull a gun on him.
Even worse for Baker was his starring role at the criminal trial, five months later. By turns soft-spoken and profane, the thirty-three-year-old newlywed had no desire for attention except when he was at the wheel of his souped-up ’67 Mercury Cougar. He didn’t relish being the sole eyewitness at a trial for a man’s life.
The months from the murder to the trial were bad all around for Baker. Right after the murder, his three-month-old marriage unraveled. Soon after the trial, he left Corpus Christi.
. . .
Baker finished work at 8:00 P.M. on that cool Friday evening. He was in a rush. He’d gotten off work an hour late, and his wife was waiting for him to pick her up so they could hit the clubs. Ten minutes later, he pulled his Cougar into the Sigmor for gas.
As he put the nozzle in the tank, Baker heard a bang on the inside of the store window. “Aw, shit,” he thought, imagining that the clerk was telling him to pay before pumping. Baker squeezed the grip anyway, knowing that he was good for the few bucks and wanting to get out of there quickly. When no gas came out, Baker turned to look through the window at the clerk.
That’s when he saw the wrestling. A Hispanic man was behind the counter, tussling with the female clerk.
“I thought they were playing at first,” Baker said later. “That was my first impression—boyfriend and girlfriend. But the more seconds I stood there—I realized they weren’t playing.” They were “fighting.” “It was a struggle.”
Baker recalled that “the gentleman had the lady and was trying hard to get her into the back of the store.” There was a back room that the man was trying “to carry the clerk into,” and she was doing everything she could to hold herself back. At one point, the attacker grabbed her hair and jerked so hard with both hands that Baker was sure her hair must have come out.
“Oh fuck,” Baker thought. “I don’t want to be here. Get in the car and leave.”
But he didn’t have it in him to desert the struggling woman. “As an American,” he said later, he felt he “should do the right thing. . . . To me it seemed like the right thing to do was go walk towards the door.” So he did.
“The gentleman apparently knew I was there,” Baker recalled. “As I started towards the store, he throwed the clerk to the floor and met me at the door.” The man came out of the door, holding it open as he stood looking at Baker, about 3 feet away.
The assailant’s greeting froze Baker in his tracks. “Don’t mess with me. I got a gun,” the man said. Baker saw nothing in the man’s hands, no gun or any money, but he stopped anyway and looked the man in the eye. “My main thing,” he explained, “was eye-to-eye contact, to make sure he didn’t use the gun on me if he actually had one.”
After a second or two, the man turned to his left, showing Baker his right profile. Then he “sprinted” the few steps to the corner of the building and took another left, running north behind the gas station store. When the first officers arrived, several bystanders described a man running behind the gas station and north up Dodd Street, the narrow street between the gas station and Wolfy’s (figure 2.1).
Later that night and again at the trial, Baker described the man he saw grappling with Wanda. He was Hispanic; had dark hair; stood 5 feet, 8 or 9 inches tall; and weighed about 170 pounds. Baker guessed that he was twenty-four to twenty-six years old. Years later, he described the man as a little older, “young thirties, probably, maybe late twenties.”
FIGURE 2.1 Aerial photograph of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station in February 1983. Wolfy’s is at the bottom across Dodd Street from the station. Standing a few feet outside the station store, Kevan Baker watched the assailant exit the store, turn left (east), and then left again (north) behind the store. Bystanders saw a man running behind the store and north up Dodd Street.
At a court hearing, Baker described the man as a “transient,” someone who looked as though he had “been on the street and was very hungry.” His clothes were shabby and unclean. He had quite a bit of facial hair: a full mustache and whiskers all over his face, like he “hadn’t shaved in, you know, ten days, a couple weeks.” He wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt or jacket with red in it, which Baker thought may have covered a gray or light-colored sweatshirt.
. . .
Baker didn’t move until he was sure that the man was gone. He wasn’t taking any chances. The attacker “didn’t seem like he was on drugs or anything or like he was drunk,” Baker said. “He knew what he was doing.”
After the man ran off behind the station, Baker took a few stunned steps back toward his car, not knowing what to do. A vehicle pulled in from the west. The driver rolled down his window, and Baker yelled for him to call the police.
Then Baker noticed the clerk. She had staggered to the front door, barefoot, dripping a trail of blood. Baker went to her.
“Th[e] young lady was coming out . . . and I met her at the door. . . . She just kind of come against me, and then fell back into the building, and started sliding down the side of the window right by the front door.” As he helped her down onto the concrete sidewalk, Wanda smeared blood on the window and all along the doorframe. There was blood all over her left side, front and back. Wanda was hysterical, pleading “Help me, help me” and trying to get up. Baker gently held her to the ground, telling her to “lay down, get calm.”
Baker’s navy training kicked in, and he looked for a wound. He pulled up Wanda’s sweater and found a slit in the left side of her bra. “A woman has an artery that goes to the breast,” he explained. “[T]hat’s what [the attacker] sliced.” Baker knew that the clerk would bleed to death unless he could stanch the flow, and he went inside the store for something to use.
As he took a few steps inside, he was stunned by the mess. There was “blood and money and stuff all over the place.” He grabbed a handful of windshield towels and ran out, ready to pack them on the wound.
As Baker knelt down, he heard sirens, and “the cops just started flying in.” He told the officers where the man he’d seen had run off. Then he stood back and let the officers do their job. A sergeant told Baker to wait by the ice machine on the east wall outside the store. Soon he was joined by other people who told police they had information (figure 2.2).
. . .
George Aguirre came first. Aguirre had purchased gas at the Sigmor several minutes before Baker, around 8:00 P.M. While filling his tank, he had noticed a Hispanic man standing by the ice machine and drinking beer. Police later found three empty beer cans in the area that Aguirre indicated. As Aguirre watched, the man slowly took a lock-blade knife out of his right front pants pocket, opened it, and put it back in his pocket.
Aguirre later described the Hispanic man as in his mid-twenties; maybe 5 feet, 10 inches, and 175 pounds; with dark hair, “blue pants,” and a “white, long-sleeved t-shirt.” A police account of Aguirre’s initial description reported “tennis shoes, a T-shirt, and blue jeans.”
FIGURE 2.2 Photographs taken from a television news videotape of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on the night of the stabbing: (left) medical technicians work on Wanda Lopez in front of the store (visible over the hood of the police car) while some of the witnesses (visible over the top of the white car) look on from near the ice machine; (right) close-up of (from left) George Aguirre, Julie Arsuaga, and John Arsuaga.
Aguirre tensed as the man approached him and asked for a ride to the Casino Club, a Latino nightclub a couple of miles away. The man offered Aguirre “money, beer, dope, whatever.” Aguirre refused, and then went inside to pay.
He told the young woman behind the counter that there was a man outside with an open knife in his pocket. Aguirre offered to call the police, but the clerk said she’d call herself. He waited until she was on the phone with the 911 operator, and then returned to his van and drove off.*1
Ten minutes later, standing outside a nearby bowling alley, Aguirre heard sirens and saw police cars heading toward the Sigmor.†2 He followed the squad cars and, when he reached the station, approached an officer to explain what he’d seen earlier. Police corralled him with Baker near the ice machine.
. . .
Julie and John Arsuaga were the final additions to the group of witnesses by the ice machine. They had run over from Phase III, a nightclub 115 yards east of the Sigmor, along the SPID frontage road. Between the club and the gas station, along the same strip, stood two other businesses: Ziebart’s car-detailing garage and a Harley-Davidson repair shop. Like the Sigmor and Phase III, these businesses were flanked on three sides by parking areas, with an alleyway behind and the frontage road in front.
Minutes earlier, as the Arsuagas were pulling into a parking spot in front of Phase III, they noticed a man running east along the walkway between them and the club. John put the time at “about five minutes after 8:00 P.M.” The jogger passed through their headlight beams and, once past the club, cut diagonally across a field between the club and Lebowitz Furniture, the next building farther east. He disappeared into the backyard of a home across the alleyway behind Lebowitz.
The couple described the man as Hispanic; about 5 feet, 8 inches; 170 pounds; with wavy, medium-length dark hair. He wore “dark slacks,” pressed “uniform”-style, and a white, button-down dress shirt.
Of the witnesses, Julie had the best eye for details of coif and clothing. Her description of the shirt was typical: “The sleeve was rolled up, it was a white, you know, blouse-style shirt, you know, something like what you [a lawyer in court] have on.” It “was open, you know, because I could see the side of it, kind of flapping back a little bit—might not have been completely unbuttoned, but close to the bottom it was.”
The man whom the Arsuagas saw was “not running fast, just a self-set pace—you know, jogging, kind of.” He struck John and Julie as comical. They joked about someone out for a leisurely jog in dress clothes at night.
After the man disappeared, the Arsuagas heard sirens and noticed some commotion at the Sigmor station. John could see a man there helping someone down onto the ground in front of the station’s store, followed by the arrival of two or three police cars. What had seemed silly suddenly looked serious. John flashed his headlights and honked his horn to get the cops’ attention. When that didn’t work, the two drove west past the Harley-Davidson shop to Ziebart’s garage, parked their car, and ran next door to the Sigmor to tell the police what they’d seen.
. . .
The witnesses’ recollections are not the only firsthand accounts of what happened that night. Two police audiotapes also tell a story. The first is the 911 tape of Wanda’s call about a man with a knife inside her store at 2602 South Padre Island Drive—the tape that ends with Wanda’s scream, the scuffle, and someone hanging up the phone. Police evidently gave this tape to the television stations to use. It is the only tape that the police disclosed to the public after Wanda’s death.
The other tape contains forty-two minutes and thirty-one seconds of telephone and radio calls to and from Jesse Escochea, the Corpus Christi Police Department’s untrained, twenty-one-year-old radio dispatcher. It was police practice to record over the master tape of 911 calls and radio dispatches every forty-five days or so, but the police made a copy of this 911 call and the forty-plus minutes of radio traffic that followed it during a massive manhunt for the attacker. Although Escochea went over the manhunt tape with a state’s attorney several months later, the tape’s existence was unknown to anyone outside law enforcement until private investigators tracked it down twenty-two years later in Escochea’s possession in Los Angeles.
Not long after Wanda’s murder, Escochea had left Corpus Christi for Los Angeles, where he worked for a time as a police dispatcher. Later he took occasional roles as an actor in cops-and-robbers television shows and made a living tracking and filming police emergency runs and turning them into reality videos for foreign markets. He kept a copy of the manhunt tape from the Sigmor stabbing as a souvenir of what he told a news reporter was one of his most memorable moments as a dispatcher.
The manhunt tape begins with Wanda’s 911 call, which Escochea answered by happenstance. As the dispatcher, he wasn’t supposed to pick up the telephone, but he did because the incoming-call light had been flashing for a long time, and neither of the regular operators had answered it. The remainder of the tape records radio traffic between Escochea and police officers in the field during the chaotic manhunt for Wanda’s attacker. It ends with Carlos DeLuna’s arrest.
. . .
Escochea took Wanda’s call at 8:09 P.M. Immediately she said what she needed: “Yes, can you have an officer come to 2602 South Padre Island Drive? I have a suspect with a—a knife inside the store.” Escochea didn’t like the caller’s tone of voice. Listening to the tape years later, he recalled thinking that Wanda had “a little bit of an attitude.”
For well over a minute, Escochea questioned Wanda about the “Mexican” man inside the store—what he looked like and what he was doing. Then he heard Wanda try to give the man the money from the cash drawer: “You want it? I’ll give it to you. I’m not gonna do nothing to you. Please!!!”
It was only then, seventy-seven seconds into the call, that Escochea broadcast his first “armed robbery in progress,” giving the gas station address.
Seconds later, Wanda screamed. Scuffling and moaning could be heard in the background. Then the phone went dead.
A minute later, Escochea broadcast another bulletin: “It’s going to be a Hispanic male with a knife. I had the chick on the phone. There’s going to be an assault in progress, also.”
Escochea initially dispatched Officer Thomas Mylett to the scene. Mylett didn’t answer, and a second call went out a minute later at 8:11 P.M. Responding to that call, Sergeant Steven Fowler reached the scene in just over a minute. If Fowler had been dispatched when Wanda first called, he would have arrived before she screamed.
Fowler found Wanda on the sidewalk, covered in blood, and radioed—inaccurately—that she had been shot. He bent over Wanda to ask what had happened but immediately saw that she couldn’t answer. Forty seconds after arriving, exactly two and a half minutes after Wanda screamed, Fowler called for an ambulance.
If Escochea had called for an ambulance when he first heard Wanda scream, it would have arrived at about the time Fowler called for it.
Officer Bruno Mejia was the second officer on the scene. He corralled witnesses at the ice machine as they arrived and took descriptions of the suspect. He broadcast the descriptions over the police radio frequency as “BOLOs”—alerts to “be on the lookout.”
The first BOLO reported Kevan Baker’s description of a “Hispanic man, about 5 foot 9, wearing a flannel shirt and a gray sweatshirt,” who was “northbound on foot, to the rear” of the Sigmor. Baker’s statement that the assailant had headed north behind the station was confirmed by police fanning out in that area who heard reports from others of a “person [seen] running to the rear of the store.” Four versions of this BOLO went out over the course of a minute, all within about three minutes of when Wanda first screamed.
After getting Baker’s description, Mejia spoke next to George Aguirre and John and Julie Arsuaga. Like Baker, they all saw a Hispanic man, twenty-five years old, about 5 feet, 8 inches, 170 pounds, with black hair. Someone—probably Julie Arsuaga—described the man’s hair as “medium” or “ear-length” and “slightly wavy, just a tiny bit, not real curly.”
The twenty-two-year-old Mejia struggled, however, to make sense of other details the three new witnesses provided, especially the Arsuagas. Unlike the light-colored sweatshirt Baker described and the white, long-sleeved T-shirt Aguirre saw, the Arsuagas were sure that the man they had seen in their headlights running past the Phase III nightclub wore a white dress shirt. The Arsuagas described the shirt in great detail: the sleeves were rolled up, and it was unbuttoned near where the shirt reached the man’s dark, well-pressed, “uniform-type” slacks.
These were not the slovenly clothes Baker described, nor the blue jeans Aguirre initially recalled. And unlike the unshaven and mustachioed man whom Baker saw at the gas station, the man who jogged east past the Arsuagas was clean shaven.
The witnesses’ reports about location and timing also conflicted. The Arsuagas were at the Phase III, more than a football field east of the Sigmor along the SPID frontage road, when the man in the dress shirt jogged past at a leisurely pace. John Arsuaga gave the time as “shortly” or “five minutes” after 8:00 P.M.
This didn’t jibe with Baker’s observation—confirmed by the manhunt tape—of Wanda Lopez’s attacker still in the gas station door six minutes later. And it conflicted with Baker’s statement that the man sprinted in a completely different direction, heading north “behind” the gas station. That put the suspect near Dodd Street, and cops swarming the area received reports from “several” people of a man running north and slightly behind the gas station to Dodd Street and farther north along that street (which turns into Dodd Drive) toward McArdle Road.
Baker and the other witnesses gathered near the ice machine noticed the inconsistencies, too, and struggled to “sort [them] out.” “We were all together,” Baker later recalled, “collaborating,” trying to make sense of what everyone saw.
. . .
All nine of the BOLOs that Mejia broadcast over a twenty-minute span that night included Baker’s description of a man in a flannel jacket and gray sweatshirt. The officer wavered, however, in broadcasting the information he got from Aguirre about the long-sleeve T-shirt—occasionally including it in his BOLOs, but usually omitting it. Mejia never felt comfortable enough about the Arsuagas’ report of a button-down dress shirt to include it in any of the BOLOs.
At first, in fact, Mejia included descriptions of any sort from Aguirre and the Arsuagas only along with expressions of doubt or a warning that they might refer to a different person. Not until his final BOLO, which guided the final eighteen minutes of the search, did Mejia give up trying to keep the witnesses’ accounts separate and merge them into a single description.
In that description, the assailant’s clothes were a confusing blend of all the witnesses’ recollections, while the assailant’s facial hair tracked what the Arsuagas recalled (“clean shaven”) and contradicted what Baker had seen (“mustache,” ten days’ growth of beard). In this and all his BOLOs, Mejia left out precious bits of information.
The first time one of Mejia’s BOLOs tacked on information from Aguirre and the Arsuagas was at 8:16, P.M. about six minutes after Wanda screamed. In this new bulletin, Mejia collapsed the Arsuagas’ description of a white, partially unbuttoned dress shirt into Aguirre’s description of a white, long-sleeved T-shirt. Aware of the discrepancies between what he was hearing from the Arsuagas and the other witnesses, the officer cautioned that the new information might describe someone different from the rest of the BOLO:
“About 5 feet, 9 inches, should have a flannel shirt and gray sweatshirt.” “Also, witnesses are saying he had a white untucked T-shirt. I don’t know if it’s another suspect.”
In his next two BOLOs a few minutes later, Mejia seemed to have settled on the description from Baker: “Hispanic male, 5–9, gray sweatshirt, flannel shirt. No other information.” And then: “Gray sweatshirt and a flannel shirt.”
Later, however, dispatcher Escochea added back in the other witnesses’ information, emphasizing that it contradicted the rest of the BOLO, and that he was uncertain about it. For example, twelve minutes after Wanda screamed, the BOLO said:
“Hispanic male, 5–9, wearing a flannel shirt and gray sweatshirt. Suspect last seen heading northbound on foot to the rear of the Shamrock. May possibly be wearing a white, long-sleeved T-shirt. That’s may possibly be.”
Seven minutes later, the dispatcher asked Mejia for more information, and the officer again queried the witnesses. Julie Arsuaga can be heard in the background on the dispatch tape, pressing her case. Mejia reported “some people” saying that it was “a white shirt, possibly a white shirt.” Then came a trickle of grooming descriptions from the Arsuagas: “Clean shaven,” “medium-length curly hair,” then, nearly a minute later, “slightly wavy just a tiny bit.”
Mejia’s final BOLO was broadcast at 8:32 P.M., twenty-two minutes after Wanda screamed. This time Mejia combined the various details into what sounded like a consistent description of a single individual:
“A Hispanic male, 5–9, with flannel shirt, possibly a gray sweatshirt. It may possibly be a white T-shirt, also, long-sleeves. Clean shaven, medium, wavy, ear-length hair. He was out there earlier looking for a ride to the Casino.”
The first sentence was from Baker. The second and last were from Aguirre. The facial and head hair information was from Julie Arsuaga.
Adding to the sense that the description was of a single person, Mejia never broadcast Baker’s information that the attacker he saw sprinting north behind the gas station had a full mustache and ten days ‘growth of beard and the unkempt look and shabby clothes of a derelict or homeless person. Nor did he mention the Arsuagas’ information that the white-shirted, clean-shaven man who jogged past them at a leisurely pace had disappeared behind Lebowitz Furniture over a football field in length east of the Sigmor and wore a button-down dress shirt and dark, well-pressed pants.
For the last eighteen minutes of the search, the police hunted a ghost, with features picked almost at random from three conflicting portraits, and not matching any actual account of the suspect’s clothes, grooming, velocity, or direction of travel (see table on p. 24).
. . .
After dispatcher Escochea signaled to patrol cars that a robbery and assault had occurred and that the attacker had escaped to the north of the Sigmor on foot, cop cars flooded the area. Within minutes after Wanda collapsed just outside the store, Escochea had every available unit in the city limits—over twenty—looking for the man who had stabbed her.
One of the first to the scene was a sheriff’s department constable, Ruben Rivera. He and his partner, Carolyn Vargas, were driving back downtown after serving papers in a civil case. They detoured to the Sigmor after hearing Escochea’s emergency call. Rivera remembered a mosaic of officers: wildlife rangers, sheriffs’ deputies, city police, and state highway patrolmen, as well as plainclothes vice squad officers in unmarked cars: “[T]here was everything out there . . . combing the neighborhood.”
As police converged on the area, officers and residents radioed and called in information from the warren of dark narrow streets, shabby wood-frame houses, interlocking yards, and alleyways. Mixed up with Mejia’s BOLOs on the tape were a jumble of clipped and urgent reports coming from many directions, including some from places so far outside the neighborhood that, in retrospect, they were beyond the reach of a man fleeing the Sigmor on foot.
Among the din of one-off calls were three intense bursts of radio traffic, each concentrated in time and place. The first flurry of sightings by officers came from the two blocks of Dodd Street and Drive that run north from the Sigmor station in the direction Kevan Baker saw the assailant headed (figure 2.3, points A1, 2, and 3). The calls peaked where Dodd intersects the more heavily trafficked McArdle Road (point 3).
The second set of sightings rolled east along McArdle for fourteen blocks, past a city park with ball fields, a middle school, and a nursing home (points 3–6 and 7). The sightings became especially intense around the intersection of McArdle and Kostoryz Roads, where there was a Domino’s Pizza on one side of McArdle and a Circle K convenience store on the other side (points 6 and 7).
Each Observer’s Description of the Man Near the Gas Station
Note: Shading indicates two sets of descriptions (the first five and last four) that largely overlap each other and are generally inconsistent with the other set.
*George Aguirre’s descriptions evolved between February and June and July.
FIGURE 2.3 The area where the manhunt took place. The Sigmor Shamrock gas station is point A1 on the left.
The third burst of calls came from way back west toward the Sigmor, in the bungalows and yards behind the Phase III Club and Lebowitz Furniture store where the Arsuagas had seen a man jogging past (points B–E).
At Carlos DeLuna’s trial, dispatcher Escochea called the first burst of activity along Dodd “a hectic situation as far as radio traffic was concerned.” “Units were just throwing out [radio] traffic” as officers closely pursued a man running north from the Sigmor.
The first officers to join the hunt were two unnamed patrolmen in Car 155. Then Officer Thomas Mylett, the Corpus Christi police officer whom Escochea had initially tried to dispatch to the Sigmor, arrived at the scene. He was followed by Constables Ruben Rivera and Carolyn Vargas, as well as Corpus Christi police officer Mark Schauer. They all had been told to go where eyewitness Kevan Baker had pointed when the first officer reached the Sigmor—in “the immediate area in back of the store,” “the area north of the station down Dodd Street.”
Constable Rivera remembered pulling into the driveway of the gas station just behind the ambulance. “Someone came forward and pointed in the direction of Dodd Street and hollered ‘he ran that way.’” Rivera and his partner turned right onto Dodd, stopped the car at the next block (point 2), and started off on foot to search for the suspect where the witness had indicated.
Soon Escochea received reports from several units of a person seen running in the same Dodd Drive area (see figure 2.3, points 2 and 3). At 8:16 P.M., less than six minutes after Wanda screamed and three minutes after the first BOLO, an officer in Car 155 radioed that a civilian witness “just saw the suspect in the 4900 block of Dodd.” That’s the block of Dodd Drive that ends at McArdle (point 3), as one travels from the south. Escochea called all units there, reporting that the “suspect [was] last seen by a witness running through the yards.” Within minutes, twenty patrol cars converged on the intersection.
For several minutes, officers tracked the assailant through the yards. With many cops out of their cars, the radio chatter died down. At one point, officers driving on McArdle radioed in a request for help stopping a dark blue Mercury with two Hispanic men in it. An unnamed officer responded urgently, “No, he was on foot. We need somebody to try and stop him.” Officers chased the Mercury anyway, stopping it a few minutes later and confirming that it was a false lead. Gradually, the cops lost track of the suspect.
The next burst of radio traffic began around 8:23 P.M., thirteen minutes after Wanda screamed and eleven minutes after Mejia began broadcasting BOLOs. This burst was even more chaotic than the first, and it was tinged with a sense of danger as the dispatcher desperately tried to reestablish contact with officers in hot pursuit of the suspect on foot. The volley of reports concentrated on several points along McArdle Road east of Dodd (points 3–7) and peaked where McArdle meets Kostoryz (points 6 and 7).
Sergeant Fowler, the first cop at the Sigmor, was also the first to direct attention to the intersection of McArdle and Kostoryz, where he had stopped a man earlier that evening. At 8:23 P.M., he asked the dispatcher if he had any police units near the intersection. Until then, Fowler had been attending to Wanda. When the ambulance arrived and the EMTs took over, Fowler started listening to the radio traffic and realized that the man described in the BOLOs might be the same one he had questioned earlier that night at a Circle K at McArdle and Kostoryz (point 7).
The Circle K was the competing convenience store nearest to the Sigmor. About an hour earlier, Fowler had seen a man loitering suspiciously outside it. When Fowler asked the man what he was doing, the man said that he was waiting for a ride. Fowler may have figured that if the Sigmor attacker had initially planned to rob the Circle K before being spooked by a cop, he might now be heading back to that store for his car or a ride.
Conversing with Escochea over the radio frequency recorded on the dispatch tape, Fowler described the man he’d seen: “Hispanic male, about 5 foot 9, white T-shirt or heavy T-shirt, almost a sweatshirt-type. . . . Beard and mustache.” Fowler thought the man was wearing white pants.
Escochea immediately saw a connection to Wanda’s description of her attacker on the phone and also to eyewitness Kevan Baker’s description of the man he saw fleeing the Sigmor. “OK,” he said over the radio, “sounds like the description the chick was trying to give me on the phone. She said he was out there trying to bum a ride, armed with a knife. Possibly could be the same one.” Still on the radio, Escochea asked Mejia to repeat the BOLO. After Mejia repeated Baker’s description—the eighth of Mejia’s nine descriptions of the assailant’s clothing—Escochea said that it “[s]ounds like the same guy [Fowler] was looking at earlier.”
In the middle of this discussion, reports began coming in of a suspect running along McArdle toward Kostoryz. Constable Rivera recalled that “an officer had broken the frequency [radioed in] and said there was a subject over in the . . . ballpark area” (point 4), along McArdle about halfway from Dodd to Kostoryz.
Midway through Escochea’s exchange with Fowler about the man at the Circle K, the dispatcher got a call for backup at 3131 McArdle, still farther along McArdle between a nursing home (point 5) and a Domino’s Pizza outlet. Domino’s (point 6) was also at McArdle and Kostoryz, across the street from the Circle K (point 7). An intruder had set off a business burglar alarm in the area, and plainclothes vice officers were responding.
Two minutes later, uniformed officers in Car 139 pulled into the Domino’s and spotted a suspect running “up behind” the store. The officers gave chase, prompting an urgent call for backup: “Anyone near Kostoryz and McArdle?” The dispatcher wanted “somebody else out there with 139.”
Units raced to the intersection. Undercover vice squad officers were the first to join the Car 139 cops. Four minutes later, patrolmen on foot saw a suspect in the alley connecting the back of Domino’s to the back of the nursing home (between points 6 and 5). He “just left the nursing home here, just south of McArdle heading north,” came one urgent call.
Other sighting reports followed in quick succession: “He jumped the fence heading towards McArdle.” “On Kostoryz and McArdle, near the nursing home, [we] got a suspect just jumped the fence to the rear, with an officer on foot.” After being cut off at the Domino’s, the suspect seemed to be doubling back toward the nursing home and possibly trying to cross McArdle to the Circle K. Police thought they were closing in.
Three minutes after Mejia’s final BOLO, and twenty-two minutes after Wanda screamed, the dispatcher called every available unit to the area around Kostoryz and McArdle between the nursing home (point 5) and Domino’s Pizza (point 6). Seconds later, an urgent call for emergency assistance came in from the area, followed by a signal requiring the channel to be kept clear of all traffic unrelated to the emergency.
Frantic calls went out from the dispatcher to the cops swarming dark alleys looking for an armed suspect to “be advised we do have several vice units in the area, plainclothes.” For two minutes, the dispatcher desperately tried to regain contact with officers in Car 155, who had been among the first responders at each step of the chase and had suddenly gone silent.
Call piled on top of call, one every few seconds at the peak. Where they overlap on the tape, some are hard to hear. One sounds like “Too far. He got away.” In the confusion, one event took steam out of the McArdle–Kostoryz search, then another event brought it to a halt.
The first event was Julie Arsuaga’s insistent description of the man she saw jogging past the Phase III nightclub, which prompted Mejia to broadcast Julie’s stream of grooming details about the man she saw. After Escochea got Fowler’s report of a 5-foot, 9-inch Hispanic male loitering at the Circle K earlier that evening with a light sweatshirt, beard, and mustache who said he was looking for a ride, and after realizing it “sounds like the description the chick was trying to give me on the phone,” the dispatcher pressed Mejia for a better description of the Sigmor suspect’s face.
On the tape, Mejia can be heard talking to the witnesses, with a female voice prominent in the background. Then, instead of Baker’s description of the mustachioed man with a couple of weeks’ worth of whiskers who sprinted away to the north, Mejia gave Julie’s description of the “clean-shaven” man she saw jogging east of the station past the Phase III. Soon thereafter came Mejia’s final BOLO, complete with the facial-hair details from Julie Arsuaga.
The urgency drained from dispatcher Escochea’s voice. Clearly, the clean-shaven man at the gas station whom Mejia was describing was not the mustachioed and unshaven man whom Sergeant Fowler had questioned earlier that evening at the Circle K. Reverting to his usual monotone, Escochea repeated the new information: “OK. You got that he’s clean shaven?”
What abruptly ended the McArdle–Kostoryz search, however, was the onset of a third burst of radio traffic. It came from a dilapidated residential area way back to the west on Nemec, Easter, and Franklin Streets behind the Phase III and Lebowitz Furniture, a few blocks from the Sigmor.
The radio traffic began with a 911 call from neighborhood resident Theresa Barrera at 8:39 P.M., just three minutes after officers had chased the suspect over the fence behind the nursing home near McArdle and Kostoryz, and seven minutes after Mejia’s final BOLO. The 911 operator transferred Barrera to Escochea, whose dispatch tape recorded their conversation:
BARRERA: Hey, there’s a guy . . . there’s police going up and down Nemec and Easter Street, you know what I’m talking about?
ESCOCHEA: Yes ma’am, we had an armed robbery in the area.
BARRERA: Huh?
ESCOCHEA: We had an armed robbery in the area, they’re checking for the armed robber.
BARRERA: Yeah, there’s a guy hiding under my truck.
ESCOCHEA: Ma’am?
BARRERA: I live on Easter Street, 4-9-4-9 Easter Street.
ESCOCHEA: 49, 49.
BARRERA: Get that [inaudible], get it on 49 Easter. He’s hiding under the [inaudible] truck. [And then, almost immediately] He just got up and ran on Easter Street.
ESCOCHEA: Which way did he run, ma’am?
BARRERA: He ran down Nemec Street toward Gabriel and Franklin.
Barrera couldn’t give the dispatcher any kind of description of the man under her pickup truck. A month later, however, she described a white shirt, pants of unknown color, and white tennis shoes.
After ending the call with Barrera, Escochea put out a new emergency call for all units, which were then swarming the eastern edge of the search area near McArdle and Kostoryz, to go back toward the western edge of the area behind Phase III and Lebowitz Furniture (see figure 2.3, points B and C): the “suspect was laying underneath a truck” on Easter (point D), and then was seen “heading eastbound on Nemec” (parallel to points D–E, on Nemec).
Almost as one, the fifteen or twenty patrol cars that had rushed to McArdle and Kostoryz (points 6–7) headed about a mile back west to Easter and Nemec Streets (point D). In a flurry of broadcasts, units reported new positions, including at a staging area on Nemec just behind Lebowitz.
Nine minutes later, just before 8:50 P.M. and about forty minutes after Wanda screamed, the first report of an arrest came in. Constables Ruben Rivera and Carolyn Vargas initially spotted the suspect. He was lying in a puddle under a second pickup truck on Franklin Street off Nemec (point E). He had no shirt, shoes, or socks on, just black “slacks,” and no mustache, just a day or two’s worth of stubble on his face.
The man begged the constables not to hurt him. “Don’t shoot me! You’ve already got me!” Rivera noticed that he reeked of alcohol.
Officers Schauer and Mylett showed up at the end and helped Rivera pull the suspect sideways from under the truck and over a cement curb onto a grassy area next to the street where they handcuffed him. Although Rivera and Vargas from the sheriff’s department first sighted and caught the man, Schauer and Mylett took credit for the arrest for themselves and the police department.
Twenty seconds later, Schauer confirmed their prize over the radio frequency: “Okay, we got one suspect in custody.” Mylett, who moonlighted weekends as a bouncer at the Casino Club, immediately recognized the suspect as someone who frequented the Casino. He was twenty-year-old Carlos DeLuna. Mylett remembered DeLuna well. Two weeks before, he had arrested DeLuna for being drunk and disorderly in the Casino Club parking lot. The dispatcher confirmed that DeLuna had a “28”—a criminal record.
The truck DeLuna was under (point D) was parked exactly a block east of Barrera’s truck (point E). The most direct route between the two was to cross Easter Street from Barrera’s home, pass through the front, then the back, yard of Barrera’s neighbor Armando Garcia, and then pass through the back and front yards of the house behind Garcia’s.
On Sunday, two days later, Garcia cut his lawn along that route. As he did, he found a trail of discarded clothes. Two white tennis shoes were on the side of his house between the front and backyards. In the rear corner of his backyard, Garcia found a white dress shirt. The shoes and shirt were put into evidence against DeLuna at his criminal trial.
. . .
After Mylett and Schauer arrested DeLuna, they were so sure they had the right man, they never bothered to ascertain his height, weight, or age or to compare them to the information from eyewitness Baker. Their commanding officers never requested that information, either. In fact, DeLuna was 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 160 pounds (consistent with Baker’s description) and twenty years old (younger than the man Baker described).
Mylett and Schauer revealed their confidence that they had the Sigmor stabber in another way as well: with their broadcasts blaring on the dozens of police radios in the area and at the gas station, the two officers proposed “bringing the suspect back to the [crime] scene” for identification.
“Anyone see the armed robbery?” Mylett asked his superiors at the gas station, who had set up a field command post there. The answer was affirmative and that Schauer and Mylett should “go ahead and take him back to the scene.”
A minute later, at 8:51 P.M., forty-one minutes after Wanda screamed, the manhunt tape ends.
Notes
*1. George Aguirre would later testify that he had seen the man with the knife enter the store just as Wanda Lopez called 911 in response to Aguirre’s warning, and just as Aguirre was leaving. As we explain in chapter 13, however, it is almost certain that several minutes elapsed between the time Aguirre left and the time the man with the knife entered the store. For reasons explained later, if the man had entered the store at the moment Aguirre first warned Wanda, just as she was calling 911, the police probably would have saved her. Aguirre never explained why he took the trouble to warn Wanda and to offer to call the police himself but then left her alone and drove off when he saw the man enter the store.
†2. We have omitted Aguirre’s claim to have seen the store clerk struggling with an assailant after he left the gas station, got onto SPID, and drove eastward past the station in the right lane (the lane farthest from the gas station). Our review of the aerial photographs introduced at trial revealing the relationship between SPID and the gas station, and our visual observation of the same while driving on the freeway past the gas station, reveal that it would have been impossible for someone in the far-right lane on the east side of the freeway—even someone standing still, not to mention someone driving at freeway speeds—to look past the three other eastbound lanes, then the three westbound lanes, over the edge of the freeway, and down to, and inside, the Sigmor store. Additionally, Aguirre gave inconsistent accounts of what he did after he left Wanda and drove away from the Sigmor. While conversing with Kevan Baker when the two were corralled together near the ice machine, Aguirre claimed that, when he left the gas station, he drove to a pay phone and succeeded in reaching the police by telephone but didn’t mention seeing the struggle between the store clerk and the assailant from his car on the freeway. At trial, Aguirre said he did view the struggle from his car but didn’t reach the police by phone.
